Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT, a Thousand Talents Program Professor at Tsinghua University, and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. He also chairs the MIT IDEAS program for cross-innovation in China and Indonesia. Otto introduced the concept of “presencing” — learning from the emerging future — in his bestselling books Theory U and Presence (the latter co-authored with P. Senge et al.). His book Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies (co-authored with K. Kaufer) applies the concept of mindfulness to the transformation of capitalism.
In 2015 he co-founded the MITx u.lab, a massive open online course (MOOC) that pioneers a blended o2o (online-to-offline) learning platform to enable transformational leadership learning for tens of thousands of participants in self-organized communities across 185 countries.
Otto earned his diploma (with distinction) and PhD (summa cum laude) from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. In 2015 he received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at MIT.